When you download something in Mozilla Firefox web browser, a download panel is displayed in which you can see the progress of all the current downloads. Even for the older downloads that have been completed, you can see all the details in this download panel. Basically it displays the name of the downloaded file, the download file size, the download speed and also gives an option to open the download folder.
However, if you have been downloading too many files and have become fed up with the download panel being displayed too many times, then you may want to disable the download panel display altogether. In the following manner, we can toggle the download panel on or off:
- First of all you have to download something so that the downloads icons appears in the Firefox toolbar. You can try downloading LibreOffice which is around 250 MB.
- When the download icon appears in the Firefox toolbar, right-click on it and then uncheck the option labeled Show Panel When Download Begins.
- This is it, now the download panel won’t open up every time you download something.
There is another way of changing this setting – through the advanced Firefox configuration interface. For this, you can follow enter about:config in your Firefox address bar. In the advanced configuration preferences, search for a setting named browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel and change its value to false. This is enough to turn off the downloads panel for Firefox browser. Obviously, you can change its value to true to make the downloads panel appear when a download starts.
Even after turning off the automatic display of the download panel, you can open it to check on your downloads just by clicking on the downloads icon in the Firefox toolbar. You can also look at the whole downloads list by using the hotkey Ctrl+J and opening the full list of all the downloads.